If there's nonsense going on around you - and we're surrounded by normal crazy people, so there always is - let yourself be entertained by it. Enjoy it, laugh at it (not out loud nor directly in someone else's face!!!) - observe. In observing, not only do we not get dragged into the drama, we enhance our ability to pay full attention to the reality of the here and now - so you've got both exercise and entertainment all rolled into one!!

Many have told me that I write exactly the way I speak and that's probably true - the words just come out at speed. But the spoken word can get "lost in translation" - this is what happened in the last Ezine where, as a reader pointed out, I appeared to suggest that smokers should take extra time to smoke... the sentence in question should have been preceded by the good old Irishism... "sure"!

Sure smokers take more time to smoke a cigarette than most of us take to meditate... to find what I referred to as "the gap". There should be, of course, another key difference between smokers and the rest of us... whilst they take five minutes to kill themselves (and those around them) we should be taking five minutes to save our lives (and those around us).

It all boils down to a question of life or death. The smoker, the "devoted" drinker or addict are mindless to the point of taking their own lives, one cigarette, one tab, one glass of hard liquor at a time. But we are only marginally better if we don't take the time to still our minds and, then, manage them. Because an unmanaged mind is, by definition, a mindless mind, operating on auto-pilot, reacting to what it perceives to be going on and, in the process, causing all sorts of mayhem.

If you've colleagues or peers and you're reacting mindlessly, you're slowly killing yourself and them - causing the kind of low-level background stress that the WHO says will take more lives in the developed world in the 21st century than anything else. If you've children and you're behaving mindlessly, you're choking the life out of them before they even pass first base. If you've loved ones and you're behaving mindlessly, they're not really loved ones, are they, if you can't be properly present with them to behave yourself, be your best and raise their experience of life too.

It's not only smoker that are a blight on our health - it's anyone who hasn't fully shown up for duty today - the duty of living one's life in the here and now to the full. It really is a question of life or death.

• Purposefully focus - it doesn't come naturally, we're actually "wired" to not focus
• Set goals in a way that energizes your subconscious into focused effortless action
• Make your very best decisions and solve problems with ease - your brain can do this effortlessly
• Banish stress - we're ordinarily "wired" to be stressed